The Opposition procession meanwhile trampled into the front garden of Mr. King’s house, his wooden house in Front Street, not the large uncompleted stone palace in Broad Street. It was quite dark by that time, but a few paraffin lamps indoors cast a pale light on the eyeballs of the crowd. Mr. King, who had been ill, spoke a few words from a balcony, but there was too much cheering and drinking going on all over the town for one to hear more than a few phrases: “national independence”, “hand of friendship”, “foremost part among the nations”. The voice was tired and mechanical : it occurred to me that the fiction might be a sad one to the principal, who must go through all the right posturings without any hope at all. No one knew better than Mr. King that a President is never defeated by votes.
I visited Mr. King a few days later at his farmhouse outside Monrovia. With an old blue bargee’s cap on the back of his head and a cigar in his mouth, he put up an excellent imitation of die old simple statesman in retirement. There was no doubt that he was a sick man. We both drank a good deal of gin while he went over and over the events of his downfall. From his obscure corner of West Africa he had managed to attract quite a lot of notice with the shipping of forced labour to Fernando Po and the pawning of children. He had feathered his nest nicely : he had his own little plantation of rubber trees he was waiting for Firestone to buy; he had his two and a half houses. But he hadn’t really any hope of a return; he was quite ready, he said, if he was elected to accept the League of Nations plan of assistance, tie his finances to European advisers, put white Commissioners in charge of the interior, give away Liberian sovereignty altogether, but he knew quite well he wasn’t going to be elected. All the rumours of Firestone money, all the speeches meant nothing at all.
He was complying with a custom; one could see that he would be glad to go back to bed. He had had a finer fling than most Liberian Presidents : banquets in Sierra Leone, royal salutes from the gunboat in the harbour, a reception at Buckingham Palace, a turn at the tables at Monte Carlo. He stood with his arm round his pretty wife’s shoulders on his stoep while I photographed him, a black Cincinnatus back on his farm.
A Cabinet Minister
The Secretary of the Treasury belonged to a newer, more scrupulous Liberia just coming into existence. He, too, had travelled to Geneva and the United States. Plump, well-dressed, with soft sad spectacled eyes, he had a dignity unknown to the Creole of an English colony. There were no prefects to laugh at him, he laughed at himself, softly, without emphasis, for being honest, for caring for other things than politics, for letting slip so many of the crap-game chances. Mr. King had built himself houses and bought himself a rubber plantation; all the Secretary had bought was a little speed-boat in which to play about in the Monrovian delta among the mangrove swamps.
He lived in a little brick villa on grassy Broad Street; he was a bachelor; and when he gave us tea it was served by young clerks from the Treasury Department He had dressed himself for the occasion (there was to be a little music) in an open-necked shirt and a large artistic tie. He was like a black Mr. Pickwick with a touch of Shelley. After tea we went into the music room, a little cramped mid-Victorian parlour with family groups on the walls, the Venus of Milo, hideous coloured plaster casts of Tyrolean boys in sentimental attitudes, and paraffin lamps on high occasional tables. He played some songs the President had composed; the piano, of course, in that climate was out of tune. They were rather noisy, breathless songs, of which the President had written the words as well as the music; romantic love and piety: “Ave Maria” and “I sent my love a red, red rose, and she returned me a white.” Then he played the President’s setting of “I arise from dreams of thee”. His friend the President, he said sadly, twirling on his stool, had once written much music and poetry : now-the Secretary of the Treasury sighed at the way in which politics encroached. He said, “Perhaps you know this song,” and while the clerks from the Treasury went round lighting the paraffin lamps and turning the shades so that the glow fell in a friendly way on the Tyrolean children caressing their dogs or listening to stories at their mother’s knees, he began to sing : “Whate’er befall I still recall that sun-lit mountain side.” It was sestheticism at the lowest level if you will, but it was genuine aestheticism. The pathos of it was that this was the best material coastal Liberia could offer to a sensitive gentle mind: the music of Mr. Edwin Barclay, the plaster casts, The Maid of the Mountains, the paraffin lamps, a sentimental song called Trees, and the President’s patriotic verses which he now beat out upon the piano : The Lone Star Forever.
When Freedom raised her glowing form on Montserrado’s verdant height, She set within the dome of Night ‘Midst lowering skies and thunderstorm The star of Liberty! And seizing from the waking Morn Its burnished shield of golden flame She lifted it in her proud name And roused a people long forlorn To nobler destiny.
It was no worse than most patriotic songs from older countries. To a stranger, I think, coming from a European colony, Monrovia and coastal Liberia would be genuinely impressive. He would find a simplicity, a pathos about the place which would redeem it from the complete seediness of a colony like Sierra Leone : planted without resources on this unhealthy strip of land they have held out; if they have brought with them the corruption of American politics, they have nurtured at the same time a sentiment, a patriotism, even a starveling culture. It is something, after all, to have a President who writes verses, however bad, and music, however banal. I could not be quite fair to them, coming as I did from an interior where there was a greater simplicity, an older more natural culture, and traditions of honesty and hospitality. After a trek of more than three hundred miles through dense deserted forest, after the little villages and the communal ember, the great silver anklets, the masked devil swaying between the huts, it was less easy to appreciate this civilisation of the coast. It seemed to me that they, almost as much as oneself, had lost touch with the true primitive source. It was not their fault. Two hundred years of American servitude separated them from Africa”; gave” them their politics: their education at Liberia College : their Press : gave them this :
The Press
WORDS BUILDING MOTHER
FIRST PRIZE FOUR SHILLINGS
SECOND PRIZE TWO SHILLINGS
FIRST ENTRY SIXPENCE. ADDITIONAL ENTRY 30.
CLOSES MARCH 2. RESULTS MARCH 9.
Use the letters in Mother to spell as many words as you can. The competitor who sends in the largest number of words entitles to the First Prize and the Second Prize goes to the Competitor who sends in the next largest number of words. Address all Communications to the Editor.
“The Unit True Whig Party now comes forward claiming to have the financial backing of Firestone to defeat the Administration. This claim is wild enough, base enough and false enough to form a suitable crown for its four years of strenuous efforts to fool the people and overthrow the Republic. But it has reckoned without its host. This is the time too many when the pitcher goes to the well and is broken.